Kafka Was the Rage_ A Greenwich Village Memoir - Anatole Broyard [36]
When Saul said he wasn’t coming back, I was sure that he had tuberculosis. It was thin, intense people like him who got it. He would have to go to a dry climate, Arizona or New Mexico. I said, It’s TB you have, isn’t it?
He was squeezing the knitted cap in his hands. He plucked a white cat hair from the nap and let it fall from his fingers. No, he said, I haven’t got TB. If it were only that. His lips went on moving silently beneath his mustache and as I watched it flutter, I wondered whether he would cut it off now that he was sick. A phrase came into my head: The quality of mercy is not strained.
Saul looked around as if he was afraid of being overheard. He put his hand up and felt his hair. I have leukemia, he said.
Leukemia? I said. The word was so unexpected. It seemed raucous to me, as if a bird—a tropical bird, a parakeet or a toucan—had cried out from one of the bare trees.
I know, he said, I know. Why should I have leukemia? Where did it come from? How did it find me? He made a fist with his left hand and clapped his right hand over it as if he was corking a bottle.
Slow down, I said, you’re going too fast. What makes you think you have leukemia? How can you be so sure? You can’t get leukemia just by saying it.
I was talking nonsense, yet I hoped to believe it. Let’s go back and start from the beginning, I said. You felt sick and you went to the doctor. He examined you, took blood, a urine specimen, and so on and sent them to the laboratory. Then you went back again and he told you that you have leukemia? This is what actually happened?
If we reconstructed the circumstances, two critics, two close readers like us, we might find that the doctor and the lab technicians had made an unwarranted assumption. Saul loved to point out unwarranted assumptions. Sometimes he read books just for the pleasure of laughing at their logic.
I know what you’re thinking, he said. I went through the same progression. You’re going to tell me that they misread the evidence—as if it was a poem. You’re going to remind me of Seven Types of Ambiguity. But there is no ambiguity—I’ve got leukemia. Believe me—I’ve got it.
I didn’t know whether I believed him or not. We never believe such things until they’re over. You need leisure to think about tragedy. Maybe you can face it only in the absence of the person, after the fact. Or you can do it only when you yourself are in despair.
You know what it’s like? Saul said, coming out of nowhere like that? It’s like getting a threatening letter from someone you don’t even know. When the doctor pronounced the word leukemia, I nearly slapped him in the face. I screamed Fuck! and Shit! But what good does it do to go on like that? I don’t see why I should disease the way I speak.
I realize, he went on—he was talking in a rush—I realize that to make a fuss is a normal reaction, but why should we? We’re not ordinary people, you and I—I don’t see why we should feel obliged to become ordinary now.
He had worked it all out. Like his mother, he had taken a position, developed a strategy. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. He made it into a rhetorical gesture. What I’m asking you to do, he said, is to go on being yourself. I need you to be yourself—don’t turn pious on me. For the sake of our old conversations, for the sake of our friendship—for the sake of literature, if you like—don’t speak to me in a hushed voice. Don’t patronize me.
Saul—I began, and he said, Shh. He pushed my voice back into my body, like somebody stuffing a pillow into a pillowcase. I threw my head up, like those boys in P.S. 44, and tried to gasp out an answer—but he wouldn’t let me. He raised his hand, and there was a terrific authority in the gesture—he had acquired so much authority.
We stared, or glared, at each other. Wait a minute, I said. Hold on. Can’t I have a little